By all means, let’s teach the controversy! Linguists here in Canada have been following closely, with a mixture of amusement, bemusement, and, it must be admitted, a little trepidation, the deliberations of our neighbours to the south, who are currently considering, in a courtroom in Pennsylvania, whether “Wrathful Dispersion Theory,” as it is called, should… Continue reading

Something for anti-technology environmentalists to keep in mind: Let me give you one small example. We complain a lot about air pollution today, but there were 200,000 horses in New York City, at the beginning of the 20th century defecating everywhere. And when you walked around in New York City, you were breathing pulverized horse… Continue reading

Salon. At age ten, still beating the odds. Congratulations!

Perhaps children’s author Philip Pullmam continues to whine about the success of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories because he knows none of his own agitprop will be turned into big-budget movies anytime soon. Who knows? I’m not a huge fan of Lewis’s fiction myself, but Michael Nelson does a nice job here of explaining why Pullman’s… Continue reading

John Derbyshire on the New Yorker’s 12/05 issue feature on the Dover, PA Intelligent Design case: The clearest indicator Talbot could find was, in fact, that people who avidly read the local newspapers were anti-I.D., while people who scorned to read them were pro-I.D. This is odd, since one of the two local papers, the… Continue reading